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12/22/02:

funkita for the dining rooms...

this year's winter solstice finds me a night in, sipping much Shiraz to ward off insomnia, full on gorgonzola/ pear salad and baked apples stuffed with mashed sweet potato and almonds, shivering comfortably, feeling slight twinges of guilt at having splurged on three new records for myself while stopping to pick up a birthday present for a friend. i'm seriously an addict. if i even walk into a record shoppe to pick up a free weekly, i'll end up burning through at least thirty dollars.

but my new copy of fragmentorchestra is warming me up perfectly on this slow sleepy Chicago night. it's pretty much the bossa-fied breakbeats one would find anywhere else in the Ishtar/ Schema catalogue, but added here is thick layers of synth washes - a perfect last chill-out disc for the morning. the usual tropes of the NuJazz genre are well represented, but there's much more in fragmentorchestra's ambient tastes, bringing to mind older electronic sounds like UK trance pioneers Black Dog and Speedy J, or classic Tresor 12"s like "Schizophrenia" or "Domina." (btw, ishtar's web site is quite gracious with free tracks)

so far I think I've gone through three favourite singers this year, warming my last winter with Joyce's crazy strength, then blown away by Elis Regina for a summer. now, not a day goes by without playing one of Gal Costa's brilliant 60's albums. this week's new one is Gal (1969), her first outing alone after Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil's exile, and here one easily opens a turbulent chapter in the Tropicalia story. she leaves the sweet melancholy of her preceeding album, produced by Gil, for a really twisted schizophrenic work ingesting much of Hendrix and American psychedelia into the Tropicalist continuum. brilliant.

(some guy named Dan the bass player for whatever reason happens to have a ton of Gal Costa pictures on his site)

also, I've been passing up the re-issue of Nelson Angelo e Joyce for too many months now. this lovely mostly acoustic album is up there with Joyce's best later work once she struck out on her own. Nelson Angelo, for me, is quite a pleasant surprise as well - I know that he was Joyce's colaborator on her early 70s songs (which in mind are her best work, culminating with Feminina in 1980 and downhill after that), and I knew that he and Joyce are the parents of contemporary Brazilian pop singer Anna Martins, but I am quite surprised at his own musicianship on this album - stunning solo vocals and a really lovely compliment to Joyce's complex voice when they harmonise. If you buy this one and The Essential Joyce, you pretty much have the best there is from Ms. DeJesus.